27 July 2008

Detecting advertisement viewers' demographic by analyzing their faces Recent articles from Random Ramblings.. and NY Times discuss how two companies TruMedia and Quividi, have systems that measure things about people who look at billboards, such as age, gender and demeanor and change the ads being displayed based on this. These two companies do this by installing cameras on the billboards and using face recognition tecbniques to provide the age, gender and other information.

Examples of these and other image recognition based audience measurement systems are

Dynamic Advertisement ProvisioningDigital Signage Association calls the above technology Dynamic Advertisement Provisioning. Here is a quote from the association “Dynamic ad provisioning from facial recognition suggests an entirely new revenue model from better message targeting,” Bunn said. “In this revenue model, content is developed for locations where targeted viewers are expected. The content is placed in storage on the media player at that location for playout when triggered (rather than simply placing the ad into a playloop).”

The WSJ had a related article but with the YCD technology. The company powering the screens for Dunkin', YCD Multimedia, is in the midst of deploying facial-recognition technologies that can classify people into certain demographic groups by identifying their approximate age and their sex.